New TaaS Features – The Inside Scoop !

Were you aware that the TaaS website (and Scout collection tool) are part of Citrix’s new agile development project? This means every 6-8 weeks we have a new release of both, adding in new features, new datapoints, and providing customers with even more in-depth troubleshooting features for their environments!

With every release we add extra datapoints to help with understanding your environment, and also extra “plugins”, which are the pattern files we use to detect common issues that may exist in your environment. V2.12 released this Monday (May 20th), and in addition to updated datapoints & plugins, this release also has some pretty cool new features for analyzing your XenApp & XenDesktop environments.

The main new features released this week are a Log viewer tool, as well as Citrix & Microsoft Hotfix viewers for XA & XD.

New Viewers available on the "Overview" Tab

Log Viewers

This Feature allows you to review the event logs from multiple servers in your environment. It comes complete with advanced filtering to let you drill down to specific events, and an export function to save the logs to CSV

Advanced Filtering For Logs

Citrix & Microsoft Hotfix Viewers

To help you manage patching levels for both Citrix & Microsoft, we’ve added viewers for each of these. You can review Microsoft & Citrix hotfix data for any of the servers you pulled data from with Scout. In addition, for XenApp environments, you can review the Citrix Hotfix for ANY servers in the environment, as this data is pulled directly from the Datastore. Research with customers showed there were numerous different ways this information is consumed, so we created three views of the same data:

Hotfix View – Select a single hotfix & see what servers it is installed on

Server View – Select a single server, and see what hotfixes are installed on it

Server Comparison – Select up to 3 servers & see a side-by-side comparison of their respective patching levels

Microsoft Hotfix Viewer

We also added in a download option, so you can save a summary of all the servers & hotfixes locally. This download is color-coded, so spotting servers that have slipped outside of your patch management system is very easy.

Downloadable Hotfix Summary Report

There are numerous other updates to the site, and new datapoints and plugins available for all our supported products (XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer & Netscaler), so if you have any of these products on your site, just log on to taas.citrix.com & see how we can assist you in documenting, reviewing, and troubleshooting your environment.

Demos At Synergy:

If you’re attending Synergy this week, why not come see our full TaaS demo session – SYN338 – on Friday May24th at 1:00p.m. (Room 304a), or check out our Demo booth on the main Exhibition floor.